Introduction

Over the past decades, the development of political participation in Western democracies has often been characterised by a decrease in traditional forms of mass participation and voter turnout which has given rise to widespread concern for the future of democracy. Putnam (2000), for example, observed that civic engagement among Americans was high and stable at the turn of the century and through the 1920s but began to dwindle with the generation born between the two world wars. This development picked up speed with the post-war generation, the ‘baby-boomers’. Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, continued the course of the boomers (Putnam, 2000, p 250).

Other academics have interpreted the changes not as a decline but as a transformation, a shift in the repertoire of political engagement. The decline in traditional forms of participation seems to be partly counteracted by the expansion of new and ‘modern’ forms of political and social engagement, rejecting the old ‘duty-based citizenship’ (voting, paying taxes, obeying the law) in favour of an ‘engaged citizenship’, based on independent, assertive behaviour and concern for others (Dalton, 2007, p 4). Similarly, youth studies have highlighted young people's involvement in unconventional, elite-challenging participation, sub-politics and social action, single issues such as animal protection (Wilkinson, 1996), spontaneous direct actions and voluntary work (Hackett, 1997; Eden and Roker, 2002) as well as participatory projects on the local level (Riepl and Wintersberger, 1999). Young people are also actively involved in innovative forms of political protest such as ‘street-party-protest’ interweaving politics and culture (Brünzel, 2000).

The changes in political participation must be understood in the context of the shift from modernity to post-modernity, materialism to post-materialism and from collectivism to individualism. It involves transformations on the level of the economy and social institutions (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2004; Giddens, 1990), epistemologies (Lyotard,1986) and value systems (e.g. Inglehart, 1977) that have reinforced processes of individualisation and pluralisation. Moreover, political institutions and their relationships to the economy and society have also changed (e.g. Habermas, 1975; Crouch, 2004), impinging on citizens’ ability and willingness to get and be active.

These transformations do not concern all citizens in a uniform way.